Snapshot of a Dream Job

Snapshot of a Dream Job

By Sean Roth

Real Estate Editor

Peter Turo has led a career worth photographing. Like any good story, Turo has risen from humble beginnings to the head of a growing company in an industry and job he loves. Sprinkle in a few celebrities, Pope John Paul II and Donald Trump, and you have the origin of his nearly 20-year-old Photo-Tech Inc.

It's anything but a typical Sarasota company. The firm essentially serves as a full-service photography company for Fortune 500 companies. Is Pepsi having its centennial anniversary in Hawaii? A Photo-Tech photographer is on stage shooting the Pepsi staff enjoying a private Rolling Stones concert. Photo-Tech was also there when drug giant Pfizer Inc. officially launched it's cash-cow pill Viagra. Turo's model for Photo-Tech is to offer all the services of an in-house company photo department and more.

Aside from covering typical business events, such as product launches and corporate meetings, Turo and staff have also created a need for their services through an incentive-trip program. Photo-Tech photographers follow top salespeople and other corporate winners on company trips throughout the world. Within days of the trip, Photo-Tech mails a professionally designed photo album of the trip to the employee at their work.

"It's all about motivation," says Turo, 47. "Companies know that it's not really the money that employees want. They know that to retain their best employees, they have to publicly recognize them.

"Traditionally, companies would give out a Waterford crystal vase, but pretty soon people would forget about it. This is something that stays with a winner ... something they and their families will remember. It becomes part of their family heritage."

Plus, it inspires a little jealousy and motivation in other salespeople.

In the past two decades, Photo-Tech has gained traction among its target clientele and grown from a staff of one to 32 photographers, 15 support staffers and 20 part-time photo-album assemblers. Besides PepsiCo, the Trump Organization and Pfizer, clients include IBM, BASF, Cincinnati Insurance, Sanofi-Aventis, Wachovia Corp., Knoll, Hewlett Packard and Prudential Securities.

As far as revenue, the company has seen 20% annual increases the past five years, going from about $3.8 million in 2002 to $6 million last year.

Turo says the company is highly profitable; it has little competition since most photographers work on their own.

To cope with an increasing staff, Turo built a new 24,800-square-foot building for Photo-Tech next to the Julie Rohr Academy in the 4000 block of Fruitville Road in Sarasota. Aside from a fairly momentous size jump from 5,000 square feet, the new building serves as a visual showpiece of modern architecture. The facility, designed by Angel del Monte, of the Tampa-based Alfonso Architects Inc., brought home one of only two Award of Excellence Honor Awards issued in the Built Category in the Florida American Institute of Architects design awards, one of the most prestigious architectural awards in the state.

Aesthetics aside, the glass and steel building allows the facility to capture significantly more natural light than a typical office building, which reduces the electric bill, even though the business relies heavily on computers and large printers, to about $1,000 a month. That's a quarter of the average electrical cost for a similarly sized building.

As for Photo-Tech's future facility needs, Turo is already planning a bigger facility. He has acquired four acres to the east of the Julie Rohr Academy and is considering the building of about 50,000 square feet in condominium-style office units.

Turo is also considering a West Coast office to better tap that market.

Humble beginnings

Born Peter Turosienski, he grew up in communist Warsaw, Poland.

"It wasn't really horrible for me as a kid because I had nothing else to compare it to," Turo says.

Turo's father had immigrated to Toronto, Canada, in the '60s. When Poland's communist government imposed tighter travel restrictions, his father was threatened with prison if he returned.

Turo was educated in Poland's sole private Catholic boys school, called Pijarzy. The school's overseer was Bishop Karol Wojtyla, who later became the Pope.

"He taught social studies," Turo says. "He was one of the coolest priests at the school. He wasn't afraid to talk about things that were outside the main church (dogma). We used to talk about sex, drugs and rock and roll. ... By the end of the week all the kids were pretty short of money; he was always good for a $20. He was just a really nice man, something real special."

Meanwhile, because of turmoil in Poland, the family, starting when Turo was 5, applied for visas to travel to Canada.

"I applied every year for about 14 years," Turo says.

In 1978, he and his brother's visa applications were approved.

"To this day, I think somebody made a mistake; they didn't check the list," Turo says. "So I left literally in jeans and a T-shirt. I got on a plane and flew to Toronto. I had $11.70 in my pocket. I called up my father and said, 'I'm here.' "

Turo hadn't seen his father in 14 years. "It was really strange meeting my father as an adult," he says.

Turo faced a huge hurdle in finding work in Canada; he didn't speak English. While he studied the language, he worked as a waiter in a French restaurant.

"The owner told me to occasionally throw in a couple French words when I was talking and no one would know I was Polish," Turo says.

It was there that Turo was discovered by a modeling agent.

"Pretty soon I found myself modeling things for the Hudson Bay company," he says.

Turo was shocked at the size of his paychecks. He made about $78 an hour in 1978. In comparison, his mother, a physician in Poland, made $50 a month.

Early on, Turo realized the modeling work wouldn't last forever so he started looking for a business skill he could use later on - namely photography.

"I would come in days when I wasn't scheduled to model to work for them for free," Turo says. "I asked them a lot of questions and eventually they let me shoot."

Those skills eventually allowed Turo to transition to fashion photographer full-time.

In 1982, Turo somewhat impulsively moved to Sarasota.

"I met a girl and fell in love," Turo says. "A lot of my Canadian friends had been coming here for years because of the fabulous weather. There was no (fashion-photography) business here. At the time, I thought it was the biggest mistake of my life."

Starting anew, Turo eventually landed freelance jobs photographing architecture, such as the work he did for large-scale developer Arvida Corp.

Turo named his one-person photography firm Photo-Tech.

"I had always been interested by architecture," he says. "I had a great admiration for the local architects here at the time. There was a lot of interest in the Sarasota School of Architecture. I was always fascinated by Carl Abbott's use of open glass space. It was very humbling recently to have him come through this building with other architects on a tour."

Going corporate

In 1983, Turo received a call from an official at the Longboat Key Club.

"They were having a nice corporate event and wanted me to shoot it," Turo says. "My first response was, 'Sorry, I don't do that. I'm a serious photographer.' Their response was, 'We know your work, we want you to do it for us.' "

Turo agreed.

"Peter is such a talented guy," says Tom Rasmussen, owner of Digital Blueprints and Color Graphics and the 16-year operator of the Longboat Key Club.

Turo's first photo shoot was for the Pfizer Corp.,

"They were just super nice people," he says. "They had several business meetings, and I delivered the photographs to them the next day. They asked if the next week I would be able to travel to Miami for them for a new product launch. I was a bit suspicious not knowing exactly what I would be covering. But they said they would pay me for a whole week and asked me what I would charge."

When Turo gave what he thought was a highball price, he says, they thought he was kidding.

"They were used to New York prices, and in Sarasota the price was less than half," Turo says. "At one point, they joked, 'If we knew your prices were so low we never would have used you.' "

That Fortune 500 company formed the framework for Photo-Tech's growth. With a steadily growing client list, Turo expanded his staff, adding photographers and support staff.

"It's a great job," Turo says. "Our photographers get to travel all over the world. Since they're following award winners and top executives they get to stay at all the best hotels and go to all the top restaurants. They get to take helicopter rides and go snorkeling. The fringe benefits are great."

The company looks for photographers with obvious talent and personality, Turo says. All new hires go through a business-environment training class.

"We teach people how to behave in certain situations," Turo says. "They are dealing with lots of chairmen of the boards of multibillion companies. You can't just push them around. These are gods with bodyguards and $20,000 a night suites that are open to them on a moment's notice. You have to use skill and be tactful. We forbid our photographers to carry two cameras. No safari jackets. You don't want to intimidate people."

Photo-Tech pays its photographers immediately upon completion of a job, Turo say. It is Photo-Tech's job then to collect from the client.

"The average photographer with us can make between $50,000 and $75,000 only working 100 days a year," Turo says.

Fun job

The Photo-Tech office also features an unapologetically creative vibe. Employees ride scooters or roller skates in the office. Instead of regular cubicles, employee workstations are surrounded by fabric pod-like enclosures, which Turo says allows greater natural light while preserving privacy. There are full showers and a large kitchen to allow the employees to spend more time in the office and feel comfortable.

Turo has older cameras on display throughout the office, including antique camera parts encased in clear resin at the reception desk - a refurbished yellow 1958 Fiat Jolly automobile and a green Harley motorcycle.

"We have fun here," he says. "A lot of us are cynical when you hear that, but people laugh here. It's a nice atmosphere. When I sit (in my office) and the sun is shining, life is good. The other day we had a movie night. We put up a movie screen outside. We had 35 blankets and little baskets of bread and cheese. On Friday nights, we have slip 'n slide contests."

Turo also hires a lot of senior citizens as temporary workers to assemble the pictures in photo albums.

"I saw a piece on "60 Minutes" about hiring people in their 80s," he says. "Those people come on time; they don't drink. The best worker we had was 85 years old and she could run a circle around here. We got a call from a lady who told us that her (late) mother lived to work here. It was her favorite thing to talk about."

As Photo-Tech has grown, Turo has transitioned from photographer to more of a management role.

"Now I have to deal with getting work visas for photographers going to Bermuda or coordinating getting new equipment out to a photographer in Colorado," he says. "That hasn't been difficult for me though. I always preferred to think of myself as a businessman in the business of photography."

Even so, Turo typically travels to ten shoots a year.

"I will look at the schedule and go 'I haven't been to Beijing so I'll cover this,' " he says. " 'This event is being held in my favorite hotel in France.' My wife thinks I'm a workaholic, but I don't see it that way. This is how I spend my time. I don't watch TV. This is just what I love to do."